The SNP’s palpable failure to advance the cause of the campaign for independence since the 2014 referendum; the Stalinesque grip of the leadership on the SNP; the SNP’s capture by neo-liberal ideas; the declining popularity of Nicola Sturgeon after her pandemic performance; a party not tainted by financial impropriety as the Operation Branchform investigation suggests the SNP are, and in Alex Salmond as leader, one of the few genuinely “big beasts” in Scottish politics.
But, alas, all this has made no discernible difference so far. At best, and according to Alba themselves, they might achieve the feat of a tiny number of MSPs elected in the forthcoming scheduled Scottish Parliament election in May 2026.
After standing in a by-election in November 2024, Alba candidate and general secretary, Chris McEleny, declared in a missive entitled Alba Party Record Best-Ever Election Result: “In recent months, Alba have doubled our vote in Dundee, trebled it in Perth and now quadrupled it in Inverclyde! Today’s result, if replicated across the West of Scotland would see not one, but two members of the Scottish Parliament elected.”
McEleny came fourth out of five candidates, polling 239 (8.7%) votes, just beating the Reform candidate by nine votes. Labour held the seat with 34% of votes – just nine votes ahead of the SNP. The turnout was a terrible 31%.
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This comes after a series of risible electoral performances since Alba was effectively launched on March 26, 2021 in a blaze of publicity focused upon the Salmond-Sturgeon feud.
In their first public outing in the 2021 Scottish Parliament elections, Alba polled just 44,913 votes (1.7%). Here they stood on their intention to build an “economically successful and socially just independent country, through the pursuit of a social-democratic programme”.
Some could forgive this performance given the party was less than three months old. But, if it was a bona fide basis upon which to build, this did not happen.
In the 2022 council elections, Alba stood 111 candidates, receiving 12,335 (0.7%) votes. And in last year’s General Election, they stood in 19 constituencies, gaining 11,784 (0.5%) votes. This means that although they have had members serving in Westminster, Holyrood and on councils, none of them have ever been elected as Alba members. All were defectors from the SNP.
It would be all too easy to lay the blame for this parlous plight at the door of Alba’s former leader, Salmond. To use a popular phrase, he was “marmite”; being either loved or loathed with not much middle ground in between. And it seems ever since the launch of Alba, he was more loathed than loved.
While there were already undercurrents of friction between Salmond and the SNP over the loss of his Westminster seat in 2017 and the pace of independence campaigning, it was the SNP-led Scottish Government’s botched investigation into his personal conduct in 2018 which then led to a criminal trial in 2020 that was the deciding factor.
Salmond was acquitted of all charges of sexual assault. But while exonerated in a court of law, how he fared in the court of public opinion was quite different. Salmond’s lead legal representative, Gordon Jackson QC, said Salmond, was “an objectionable bully”, “a nasty person to work for” and could have been a “ better man”.
Indeed, Salmond admitted to sexual contact with two of the complainants against him, both junior and much younger than him, and his defence characterised him as “touchy-feely”. During the trial, Salmond himself said he wished he’d been “more careful with [other] people’s personal space”. That was a stench that was never going to go away, suggesting he was something of a beast of a man.
But even that does not explain the unpopularity of Salmond. Most political leaders are arrogant and egotistical, with a large helping of hubris added into the mix. Salmond was no different.
His pitch for the 2021 Holyrood election showed he had lost what many thought was his Midas Touch as a supreme strategist. As the upstart political leader who leveraged an independence referendum out of Tory prime minister David Cameron, and came close to winning on September 18, 2014, his idea of an independence “supermajority” was a non-starter.
His argument was there was nearly one million wasted votes for independence because they were cast on the regional list for the SNP, giving them virtually no more seats due to the D’Hondt method used for the Parliament’s election. Those votes should, instead, come to Alba and the Greens.
This missing Midas Touch runs much deeper though, being about the creation of Alba itself. Salmond failed to appreciate the scale of the challenges of establishing breakaway progressive parties where those making the break were not involved in leading rising community-based struggles, simply declare the need for a new party and, in doing so, did not recognise the distinction between struggles and campaigns.
Instead, Salmond thought his mere “will to power” through the power of personae was enough. There was no-one of sufficient stature in Alba to suggest any differently. If Salmond had understood the genesis of the Scottish Labour Party( SLP) and Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), he could have come to a quite a contrasting conclusion.
The SLP were a forerunner of Alba while the SSP were a successor to Alba. Let me explain.
First, let’s recall some more of the details of Alba’s formation. Action for Independence was set up in July 2020 by former SNP MSP Dave Thompson to stand on the regional lists for the 2021 Scottish Parliament election. As its name suggested, it was discontented with Sturgeon and the SNP’s strategy for gaining independence.
On March 25, 2021, Tommy Sheridan announced that he, along with 41 other candidates, would stand for Action for Independence. This was just a day before Alba was publicly announced by Salmond.
If there was any brother or sisterhood amongst independence supporters, it had clearly been dispensed with. And yet the bulk of the left activists, especially around the Common Weal group, eagerly left the SNP to join Alba. Alba’s membership was a not insubstantial 7500 (including many former SNP MSPs and councillors) in late 2023. But it was a poor party, with an annual income of around £400,000 and a deficit for 2023.
Let’s now turn to the SLP.
Formed on January 18, 1976 as a breakaway from the British Labour Party, by Ayrshire Labour MP Jim Sillars and his supporters (like future SNP MSP Alex Neil), the SLP indicated a disorganised disaffection and discontent with Labour’s failure to secure a devolved Scottish Assembly and its increasingly right-wing social and economic agenda.
But by 1981, the SLP dissolved, with many of their leading members either re-joining Labour or joining the SNP. They only ever won three council seats under its own banner. Even Sillars was not re-elected in the May 1979 general election. All other elected representatives were defectors from Labour. Their performance in parliamentary elections was risible, mostly gaining less than 1% of the vote.
Jim Sillars and Alex Salmond (Image: Newsquest) In his 2021 autobiography, A Difference Of Opinion: My Political Journey, Sillars wrote of the alleged infiltration of Marxists into his party: “The effect they had … was to exhaust us, and finally to be instrumental in blowing us to smithereens at our first conference in Stirling. Those of us who were left limped on as best we could … But the effect of the [Marxists] was not the reason the SLP failed.
“Labour, with their solid backing from the unions, was structurally strong and, once the initial angry reaction in Scotland to the White Paper [on devolution] wound down, there was no space for the SLP to develop.”
This did at least point to a key issue for breakaway political parties, namely, the need to have firm and substantial roots amongst the communities of the organised working-class if they were to become not only permanent parties but effective ones too.
So, let’s turn to the modern SSP now.
Unlike those parties of the same name formed in 1932, 1942 and 1988, it shows how a successful breakaway political party – from Labour – can be built (even it was subsequently felled by Sheridan’s actions to protect his sexual peccadillos).
The new Scottish Socialist Party MSPs after being sworn in to the first sitting of the Scottish Parliament, from left, Rosemary Byrne (South of Scotland), Frances Curran (West of Scotland), Colin Fox (Lothians), Tommy Sheridan (leader) front, Carolyn Leckie (Central Scotland), and Rosie Kane (Glasgow) The SSP were only launched in 1999 after the Militant Tendency’s leading role in the successful mass anti-poll tax movement in Scotland of 1988 to 1990. Militant in Scotland established itself as Scottish Militant Labour in late 1991, then winning won several seats on Glasgow City Council.
Sheridan’s victory in the Pollok seat was the most obvious instance here.
Only after this and engagement in other struggles against the likes of water charging did Scottish Militant Labour take the initiative to form the Scottish Socialist Alliance (SSA) in 1996. The SSA then contested the 1997 General Election. It mattered not that they won no seats.
Winning respectable votes was enough to keep the forward momentum going because it was rooted in community struggles.
Working with many others ranging from communists to socialists, social democrats and left-wing nationalists, the SSA established the SSP in early 1999. Sheridan won a Glasgow list seat in the first elections to the Scottish Parliament, laying the groundwork for the breakthrough of six SSP MSPs elected in 2003.
Although of much less stature, the same failures for the same reasons have been recorded by the Labour Party of Scotland and Communist Party of Scotland. The former were a left-wing breakaway from the SNP in Dundee in the early 1970s. The latter were formed in 1992 from the British Communist Party but dissolved in the late 2010s.
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The same pattern of successful building from the base upwards through community campaigns and standing in local elections before attempting to make an appearance on the national stage has worked for the radical left parties in the Republic of Ireland, whether they be the Alliance Against Austerity, Socialist Party or People Before Profit.
The community struggles were against the bin tax and water charges and comparable with like those of the poll tax and water charging in Scotland. These parties gained seats on local councils and in the Irish Parliament, aided by proportional representation (albeit a different form as used for Scottish Parliament’s list seats).
National columnist George Kerevan is no impassive observer of Alba.
As a former Marxist SLP member, he joined Alba in 2021, standing for it in the 2024 general election.
Of its 2022 electoral performance, he opined in the Scottish Left Review: “… See[ing] themselves to the left of the SNP, [they] failed to make any gains and lost all of their sitting councillors. [With a] combined vote of 12,335 … it is hard to see Alba becoming a significant force any time soon, despite their recruitment of some thousands of old SNP party cadres and avowed leftists.”
More recently on the Conter website, Kerevan wrote that Salmond’s passing “will have repercussions. Obviously, it leaves his Alba Party – essentially his own creation – in a crisis …
“Leadership of Alba will probably now fall to Ash Regan, Alba’s sole MSP. But whether Regan has the capacity or charisma to lead a fresh assault on Holyrood is a moot question. This leaves Alba’s tiny membership in a quandary”.
Subsequently, Regan did declare her candidacy just last week.
And yet Alba cannot quite be written off. Their chances of success are small and slim but its decisive day of judgement in the post-Salmond period will surely be May 7, 2026.
They do not enter this contest in the best of health – not because breakaways and splitters cannot win but because they have not understood the deep dynamics of developing roots in communities through continued collective struggles that bring about cognisance and credibility.
Though it does not help and does hinder, this is much more important than the perception of Alba as maybe “economically radical” and certainly “socially conservative” due to their “gender-critical” stance on transgender individuals and gender self-identification.
Less than a year before he died, Salmond called the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill 2023, still blocked under a Section 35 order by Westminster, “the worst legislation in the history of devolution”.
So, it will be this lack of understanding of the dynamics of developing deep roots that will stop Alba from making hay with the decline of public services under the SNP or the outcome of Operation Branchform investigation, especially when the SNP have been given a much-needed shot in the arm by the actions of Labour under Starmer.
Professor Gregor Gall is a research associate at the University of Glasgow and editor of A New Scotland: Building An Equal, Fair And Sustainable Society (Pluto Press, 2022)